


How not to say "I love you"

by pajamaprodigy



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Angst, Aoba is a messy bi and it's sad, Canon Compliant, M/M, One-Sided Attraction, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 03:08:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6735631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pajamaprodigy/pseuds/pajamaprodigy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of drabbles about Aoba Kuronuma's feelings for Mikado. Canon compliant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How not to say "I love you"

Some people say there are millions of ways to say “I love you.” That you just need to love someone, that you don’t even need words. All you need to do is love the other person, and your love will show through.

If Kuronuma Aoba had ever heard that, it didn’t seem especially meaningful to him. After all, humans were scum who would hurt and take advantage of each other at every opportunity, himself included. The thought of him being so weak as to love anyone would have been laughable. 

Would have been, if Aoba hadn’t blurted out the question of whether Ryuugamine Mikado and Sonohara Anri were dating. If he hadn’t been so oddly concerned by Mikado’s embarrassment with the question. He understood that Mikado’s feelings for Anri would only make things easier for him. There really was no reason he should feel anything but gratification that he now had someone he could use against Mikado.

If he hadn’t, for hours and days after the car chase replayed in his mind, Mikado’s gentle, genuine smile. While microwaving breakfast, while riding to school, while his teachers lectured on topics he already knew, while cleaning up after art club, while brushing his teeth before bed at night, it played over and over in his head. When he recounted the incident to his fellow Blue Squares, he smiled too, a gentle, genuine smile of his own.

If Aoba hadn’t felt himself pushing closer and closer to Mikado as they argued. If Mikado’s shock, anger, and that same beautiful smile hadn’t made Aoba step close enough that he could have reached out to touch Mikado if he wanted. Aoba didn’t want to, of course. But if he had, he could have reached out and held him.

If the coldness of Mikado’s eyes as he drove the pen into Aoba’s hand and mercilessly wrenched it out again were no more than frightening. If watching them warm, and the look of concern for his bleeding kouhai manifest no more than a relief. As Mikado held his hand up to bandage it, Aoba did not take his eyes off of Mikado’s face. There was nothing in the world he would rather look at.

If for weeks afterwards, Aoba still prodded the wound, hoping it would continue hurting, hoping the blood would seep through his bandages, hoping the scar would be visible to everyone. He wanted to be marked forever.

If Aoba hadn’t been so afraid that Mikado would think less of him if he knew his brother’s identity.

If Aoba hadn’t run so carelessly past the boys who had been his friends for years to Mikado’s side. If Aoba had not felt burning, seething hatred for the boy in the white hoodie, beyond what he would ordinarily feel for a member of another gang. If Aoba hadn’t come home with Mikado that night, dabbed water and rubbing alcohol on his cuts and told him everything he knew about caring for bruises. Despite the blood, despite Mikado’s sharp gasps in pain, Aoba felt an odd pleasure at touching his face. Mikado thanked him afterwards, with somewhat distracted concern. When Mikado insisted on going as soon as possible to a manga café, Aoba went with him until he was checked in, well after two in the morning. He got only a few hours of sleep the next morning, passing out with his jacket on and Mikado’s blood under his fingernails and the scent of sterile alcohol hanging around him. After waking up, Aoba almost didn’t want to shower it off. He just wanted to see Mikado again.

If he hadn’t preferred the abandoned building where they were camping out to his mother’s apartment. There was no electricity, so he slipped 1000 yen from his mother’s wallet, as he often did when he needed something he couldn’t ask for, and bought a camping lantern. Mikado was the one who solved the problem of internet, handing the wifi extender he already owned over to Aoba to sneak into a nearby office building. Aoba sent Gin and Houdou to do it. He offered to help Mikado set up his bed, but Mikado said he could do it on his own, so Aoba merely watched, sitting on the floor. Aoba divided up guard duty later: at least three blue squares would be on the first floor of the building at any one time. Mikado would remain on the upper stories whenever he was at the base. The others grumbled amongst themselves, but Aoba didn’t mind. They were scum anyway. Miles below Mikado.  
Aoba spent as much time as he could at the building. He left his apartment early and only rarely returned before midnight. He ate bread from convenience stores, dangled his legs off the sides of the unfinished stairs, and took every excuse to go to the second floor. He took guard duty in the mornings, and imagined Mikado waking up above him (not knowing yet that Mikado had been awake for hours before Aoba arrived) and reread their old texts while he waited for the next shift of guards to arrive. Every moment he spent at Mikado’s side, in the warehouse by day or fighting enemies of the Dollars and the Blue Squares by night, was the best moment of his life. Every lie he told, every Molotov cocktail he threw, every one of his fellow angry and frightened youths against whom he and his gang committed violence on Mikado’s behalf was not enough. He would push along with Mikado, as far as they could go, lay down their own lives, both of them, as tribute.  
In July, Aoba made his decision. He told his two uninvolved friends that he hoped they would be safe, that he liked them, and that he might not come back. If Mikado was destroying this city, Aoba wanted to be there with him to the very end, helping. The danger he was in was Aoba’s favorite thing about Mikado. The knowledge that he might not make it out of the summer alive was what he loved, he thought. He and Mikado, both of them, were means to an end.

If Aoba hadn’t been more hurt by Mikado’s gentle, genuine smile and the laugh he shared with Izumii Ran than by seeing his brother again and feeling the same sickening horror after all those years. If he hadn’t been willing to sit in with Ran while he spoke to Mikado. If he wouldn’t have been willing to spend an eternity alone with Ran just to make sure that he never came near Mikado. If Mikado’s joking remark that Aoba was too hard on his brother, that he was jealous as an only child, had made Aoba angry rather than sickeningly sad. 

If shortly before midnight on August first, Aoba’s empty promise not to hurt Kida Masaomi had been made solely for the tactical gain of the Blue Squares. If Aoba had not wanted just to see Mikado smile at him, or even look just a little less empty and frayed. Instead, Aoba believed that he was fully ready to kill and to die that night. He was ready to order the death of Rokujo Chikage, ready to let his fellow Blue Squares get killed by the Bosozoku. He was willing to let Mikado’s friend become one of the casualties. Anything to push forward Mikado’s meaningless resolve. Anything to continue swimming in the ocean Mikado had created. Anything for Mikado. Aoba was ready for anything.

Kuronuma Aoba was not ready for the events of the early morning on August second, when he was tied to a lamppost as gunshots rang out in the Ikebukuro night, nor for what he’d find out later that day, around eleven in the morning. He had collapsed with exhaustion on the sofa in his mother’s apartment where he found himself again after being out for almost thirty-six hours and opened up the his phone. Ryuugamine Mikado had been stabbed twelve times in the abdomen, nearly gutted. Aoba stared at his phone for a moment and, unable to remember when he had last slept a full night, having lived the past several days on convenience store bread, Russia Sushi, and canned black tea, the fourteen year old boy was too weak to do anything but fall asleep. His mother found him when she came home from work. She had seen the news reports of the bosozoku meeting and the stabbing of a Raira student, and she had several things she wanted to discuss with him when he woke up.

It would have been laughable for Kuronuma Aoba to fall in love, when humans, every single one of them, would inevitably fail him, because it was impossible for any human to survive on or as an ideal alone and because everything he had loved about Ryuugamine Mikado had been that empty ideal, that meaningless resolve, or its bloody symbols. It would have been laughable that it wasn’t even love for a human that brought Aoba so low but love for a fantasy conjured by the two boys as they destroyed themselves and the people closest to them. It would have been laughable that Aoba was right about falling in love with another human: it was impossible and it ruined him. It would have been laughable if he could laugh too. 

Instead, Kuronuma Aoba lay on the floor in his room, reading through old text messages and chatlogs for hours. It was getting late and he was tired, but neither sleep nor wakefulness held any more value to him. Instead, as Ryuugamine Mikado lay immobile amongst the cords and tubes the connected his very human body to the world of the living, Kuronuma Aoba decided he could not bare another word and threw his cell phone against the wall opposite his bed. He thought he heard a cracking sound, but he didn’t get up for a long time. Instead he sat there, eyes closed against tears. “I love you”


End file.
